


About Little Gods

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Multi, Writing, sorkin_fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-19
Updated: 2008-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Huck comes when the days are shorter." This is a 'how Huck became a writer' story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	About Little Gods

**Author's Note:**

> Written for sorkin_fest.

**1.**

Huck comes when the days are shorter. Winter travels in New York, block by block: short gusts down long alleyways and storms which drive the snow up his front steps and barricades the door. Toby shivers a lot and wears a collection of thick sweaters around the apartment and only takes his gloves and scarf off when he remembers to. He feels the cold more easily now, knows it and hates it. He wakes in the early morning - nose and ears freezing, and his breath making patterns in the darkness - and makes for the bathroom, hands aching for warm water. And when he has held his fingers under the faucet for ten minutes and is starting to feel like he could do a passable impression of a human being, he looks up into the mirror over the basin. Sees a old man he hardly recognises, and closes his eyes again, suddenly weary.

But Huck likes the winter, loves the snow. And he is only twenty, and Toby won't withhold any joy from him, and if a snowball fight in Prospect Park is what Huck wants, that's what they'll do.

Huck travels down from Columbia (with only a thin black scarf and a green leather jacket over shirt and jeans, in this two-below cold) long stops on the subway. He comes down from the University, where Toby has given up his teaching in favour of the more familiar charms of Brooklyn College, when he has something to show his father.

He came to Columbia, Toby thinks, for something to hold on to.

Molly went to London, because they couldn't stop her; Andrea stayed in Maryland, because she has a sense of duty; Toby himself is grounded in New York, and his crazier impulses do not worry him here and no-one here cares about his dead brother, or his broken marriage, or his sense of heroics. He is home now.

But Huck has become a drifter, unmoored. A good kid, always. A little too good, perhaps, for the appropriate levels of self-preservation to be properly nurtured. A good student too: salutatorian at his high school, although he begged his mother for compassionate dispensation to fail one paper, any paper, so long as it brought his GPA down. Andrea, not at all surprisingly, had refused. And so Huck got his reputation for outstanding intellect, along with competing ones for silence, for a certain kind of fragility, and for a magnetic attraction (both willing and unwilling) to hurt.

So they are, as ever, a family fractured.

But like a thin red thread around each of their wrists, like blood spiralling heavy in water, Huck sought Toby out, always Toby, with a despair his father hardly even notices anymore; so used is he to meeting its requests, which are quiet, small, familiar. There are hollows in his heart which hold the echo Huck's need makes, which is magnified and not diminishing as the boy gets older; there is always an answer, and the question is never disputed. Toby doesn't understand the trust his son has in him or the desperation which clouds Huck's eyes sometimes: doesn't need to understand, but recognises it dimly in himself.

Huck stays with Toby about half the nights of the week during his first year at Columbia; Toby is happy to let him. They are close then, almost like a couple: sharing space and food, losing the need for words, missing the other one if the apartment is empty when they return. Huck holds on tightly to the ragged edges of his family, calling his mother at least once a week and spending afternoons chatting to his sister over the internet and watching the time difference fail to pry them apart. But more to Toby, whose body he still curls against some nights, against the rage of the city and of CNN.

Huck, who is gearing up to major in English literature, usually reads a little poetry against the night; Toby, with his notebook balanced on his knee and one arm around the boy, watches him and begins to get a feeling for the thing he knows is coming and scribbles down scraps and phrases in his now mis-used pad about his son who will start soon, before the year is out Toby thinks, on the path set out for him.

Toby doesn't know how he knows that his son will end up a poet, and not a penniless one either, but he is sure. Quietly, secretly certain.

Now, the snow has come. And Huck has come back too. And in his hand there is a sheaf of papers, disarrayed by the storm. He knocks on the door of the apartment he used to share with Toby, rings the buzzer cautiously, even though he has a key. Waits until he hears his father ask him to come in, even though Toby knows exactly who it is out there. Toby thinks he needs the idea of a threshold; something to cross, bravely.

Huck's footsteps are as quiet as a cat's. He is a slight boy and looked, in this snow out the window when Toby was watching for him coming up the street, just like a smudge in the long whiteness; like someone's thumbprint. He slips off his shoes at the door and pads through to Toby, who is sitting with his back to the door, like a test, chilled and naked at his neck and hands, having shoved his scarf and gloves down the side of his armchair. Huck puts his arms around Toby's neck and rests his head on Toby's shoulder. There isn't a better greeting in the world to his father. Toby raises his hands over Huck's wrists, squeezes them tight.

_Hey. // Hi_.

Their breathing sounds like the wind outside, but warmer. Toby can feel the pulse at Huck's neck beating quickly where it presses against his cheek.

"Hi, dad."

"Hi, kid."

"I brought you ... something. And you're not allowed to mock."

Toby smiles, and nods. "Okay."

"Seriously."

"I said okay."

Huck holds out the papers in his hand. Open hands, trusting. His eyes are bright, almost febrile. Toby half-frowns. He gets up from his chair and takes the pages out of Huck's hands. Their fingers brush and Huck turns away, quick, like Toby has slapped him. Toby lays the papers down on the table beside his chair and puts an arm around Huck's waist, kisses his hair.

"Go make me some coffee. I'll get started on these."

Huck nods. "Okay."

**2.**

It all happens back to front: Huck writes a novel and Toby finds himself with a collection of poems, published in a small book with a blue cover.

He isn't sure why people are reading them, beyond the irreducible fact that he knows how to put one word after another. In scope they are plain, in theme they are ordinary. He has become a formalist in his old age and he mentions love, and if not love, God, far too much. And he doesn't believe, as his agent would like him to, that his name alone is enough to get these books off the shelves.

It's hardly enough to give up the teaching on. But he quite likes the idea of adding the word 'poet' to his resume. It amuses his ego. He calls Sam after things have calmed down a little and isn't at all surprised that he can already quote large chunks by heart. Toby thinks that if he could see Sam now, he would still need to look away from the heavy light of worship in his eyes.

He sends CJ a copy with a photo of Molly and her fiance tucked inside the cover. She sends him back an envelope with a picture of Maggie smiling whilst trying to get out of range of her dad's camera and a three-times-folded Xerox of Maggie's SAT scores that will make Andrea whistle through her teeth and then spill a happy, ringing laugh down the phoneline when he tells her.

_Tell Andy she owes me a bottle of Merlot_ is scribbled on the back. Toby smiles.

Abbey Bartlet calls him with congratulations, and Toby has no idea what to say, and so diverts the conversation onto his son, about whom he is much happier to talk. Ghosts rise between them now and he remembers too many conversations he only had in his head, over the never-to-be-settled question: my kid's a genius; ah, but so is mine! When he says goodbye to Mrs Bartlet there is an apology in his mouth. But he does not know how to say it.

Andy lets almost an entire weekend pass before she even mentions it. They are doing the dishes, in silence, companionably. Into the quiet, she quotes a line.

_Is that one about me?  
They almost all are about you.  
No, that one. That one in particular, Toby.  
Yes.  
It ... it hurts. It still does.  
I'm sorry.  
Not only that way ... I can't explain it.  
Neither can I. Which was sorta the point.  
Are you staying, tonight?  
If you ...  
Yes. Please.  
Okay._

Her hands are covered in soap suds when they hold his shoulders. He tries to hold her and a centrepiece of the expensive dinner service at the same time and not wonder if she is crying. He places a gentle kiss in her hair, still too aware of the crockery. She sighs and takes the plate out of his hands, drains the water in the sink, dries her hands and takes one of his, leads him upstairs, doesn't take no - or yes - for an answer.

**3.**

Huck is also a traditionalist. He writes about a young man in love; he writes about himself.

A few years before:

"Dad, I-I ... I have to tell you. Something."

"What's that?"

"Look, I'm never going to bring a girl home, dad. I'm g -- "

"Uh huh."

Huck frowns; Toby shrugs.

"I met ... "

"A boy?"

A silent nod.

"This boy have a name?"

"Stephen."

Toby shrugs. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"What did you think?"

"I don't know."

"I don't care, Huck. So long as you're not getting involved with anyone who I, at the end of it all, will have to throw a punch at."

"Dad, you're -- ."

"I don't care how old I am, kid."

Huck smiles. "Okay."

No one had to throw a punch, but there was a day when Huck called home and wouldn't answer questions and wouldn't talk about his day and his voice sounded strained and upset, his cough crackled on the line.

And Toby thought: so, that's one rite of passage less. Someone has broken my son's heart.

**4.**

Huck spends a week in bed trying to avoid eating. Trying to avoid having his eyes open, or being sensible to anything beyond the dirtying sheets of his bed which still stink of sex. He flinches from the sunlight and nestles into the varying degrees of darkness which occur, with his blinds drawn and the door locked, hours going unmarked. He spends a few hours staring at the ceiling of the small dorm room he does not think of as his home, absently expecting a different pattern of cracks and discolourations but also, with the skewed logic of those recently bereaved of love, accepting that it is correct that it should be this hollow place which houses his grief.

On the ninth day of this haze, groping for something solid in a world made up mostly of squalor and scraps of memory that might be dreams, his fingers come to rest on the notebook his father bought him for his twentieth birthday. He keeps it by the bed because his psychiatrist told him to keep a dream journal, and even though Huck seldom actually does what his psychiatrist tells him he still feels guilty. There are a few sentences, scribbled by a night hand, now incomprehensible. Huck has forgotten these nightmares; now he has all new ones.

He hates himself for doing it; he loves the sensation doing this gives him: an itch scratched to the quick, blood under his fingernails; a warm kind of pain and a sick drop in his gut; something familiar, like a hand rubbing circles on his back; something he has tried not to remember or wish for or miss or crave - Steve's head between his legs, helplessly coming, too fast to care, the part of him that watches the rest switched off - his voice smothered with pleasure, lying on his back unable to move but trusting that it doesn't matter, that he won't have to run anymore; letting Steve kiss him, tasting come on his lips, not being disgusted, not feeling like the wrong person for his body just this once, not trying to hide, not feeling hot and uncomfortable and out of place when Steve kisses the shallow arc of his cheekbone, on the left side.

He writes Stephen down on the page, writes these things as if they are poetry and not grief. The story will come later.

The next year, in the middle of May, a plane goes down somewhere off the coast of Greece. Stephen is on the plane, drowned with fifty-three others. Huck comes home to the message light on his voicemail blinking red. Stephen's sister has called everyone in his addressbook. Huck stands in his kitchen for a long time, watching cold water stream from the faucet over his hands. Then he calls his father, leaves a message on his voicemail.

"Dad, I need you to tell me what you think about something ... "

**5.**

When Huck is a young man and Toby an old one, they begin to talk about creation. Neither of them have any idea what the right words are. They go blindly towards an answer, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Red threads trace some kind of course, wrist to wrist, heart to heart, running over the paper like a nib through carelessly split ink, like a map of a labyrinth.

**6.**

When Toby gets the diagnosis, it all happens exactly as he had feared.

Molly, who is happy and strong and drawn in primary colours in his head and no longer the little girl who turned away from his hand in the centre of her back, turns white and small and tiny; a little bird, waiting to be broken. He will be the first thing, as he always was, that she has ever lost.

Andrea hides from him: covers up her hurt in layer after layer of situationally appropriate behaviour, never shouts at him, never cries where he will be able to see her. When they share the bed, which they do more often now that they have run out of arguments, she is a fragile thing next to him; her back thin and white as porcelain. He traces the shape of the sephirot onto her with his fingers and wishes, silently, that she would let him be the strong one, here where no-one can see them.

Donna looks more stricken than Josh, but she has lost the knack of hiding her hurts. Josh's eyes are a rich, sea-depths grey: the colour of his grief. Toby is almost ashamed to be adding another name to the list of the lost, but he doesn't think Josh will hold a grudge.

CJ is exactly the same, almost. He is surprised that it is a tremor in her voice - of all things - which gives her away. She doesn't want to be sad, and he doesn't want to force her to be. So they do what they have always done: bad jokes and startling accomplished flirting, her eyes gleaming and his challenging. Same old dance. He hopes it makes her feel safer, less like a shipwreck; he knows it does him.

Sam starts to stutter, and Toby dearly wishes he would stop but can't bring himself to say so. He allows him one kiss, disappearing into the hair at his temple. Sam looks like he will cry, but doesn't. He never believed in God, but he never stopped believing in his boss: _why are you forsaking me?_ He is pushing at the air with his hands, trying to push it onto Toby's body, bulking up ribs and belly and chest with his imagination; trying to make him strong and whole again, like Sam remembers him. Toby asks him if he wishes he hadn't come and Sam just shakes his head and turns to leave, then comes back from the doorway and throws his arms around Toby's neck. They hold each other for a long time but when Toby wakes up, Sam is gone.

Huck comes when the days are shorter, like he always has. They play chess and ignore the weather. His hair glints black in the reflected light of the snow over Brooklyn and though Toby knows he is angry and frightened and fragile and about to be kicked into a world he knows nothing about - a world where the red guiding threads have been cut - he smiles over the chessboard. When his black hair and dark sweater have started to fade into the half-light and Toby knows the boy is asleep, he also closes his eyes.

Huck makes all the calls, because no-one else can bear to. It's CJ who finds him later, after everything is finished and put away - the house wiped clean of the memory of death - and the process of changing to fit the now-empty spaces has begun. She puts her arms around him, very gently. He seems both more and less solid now: there is a quality of transparency in his eyes and his skin is china white but she notices, when she lets him go, that he stands in an odd way, resting his weight on one hip and giving his thin belly a slight curve as he does so, shifting his feet; a natural at looking uncomfortable. He seems _heavier_, taking up more space in the world. She kisses his cheek.

"You were brave," she says. She's amazed, really. He always hated making phonecalls before.

He shakes his head. "Not really."

"He'd be proud."

"I know."

"You call me," she says, fascinated by the brown of his eyes, "If you need to."

He nods again, and smiles. "I will."

**7.**

His mother says she just isn't surprised anymore, she knew they were little geniuses as soon as they were born. Huck rolls his eyes and Molly, when he tells her about it later, sighs (_oh mom_) but he hugs her, very close, and tries not to feel anything but glad. He doesn't ask and she never elaborates on the little bookmarks, Post-Its and turned down pages which appear in her copy, whether they are places she remembers or ones she never knew. He hopes that they are not too wrong.

CJ makes a call: _It's not fair of you to make me cry_ all _the the time, Huck ... No, I don't want your apologies. Wicked boy. Where did you two learn all this stuff? ... I think he'd have loved it, sweetheart. I mean, I think he'd have yelled a little, but you already know that ... What does your mom think? ... Yeah, I know. Me too ... It's amazing. No, really! ... I mean it, Huck ... Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you did ... But there's no money in poetry, right? ... Yeah, okay, sweetheart. Call me soon. Bye._

He and Molly go and see a play in New York the day after she finishes the book, and they don't say anything about it. She cries when the lights are down, but when they are sitting in the little diner down the street from the old place, and he looks up at her over a slice of cherry pie, her eyes are bright.

Sam sends a note: _This is beautiful, almost too beautiful. I'm not sure anyone else could have done him justice._ Sometime towards the end of that year they will meet up by accident and start talking and plotting and discovering things they didn't know they knew, about creation, about little gods.

**8.**

When Huck is a man with words to his name, he goes to talk to his father about creation. It is snowing by the time he gets to the cemetery and he can't see at all well in a world entirely composed of whites and greys, all blurred. In his hands there is a sheaf of papers on which the ink is starting to run. His feet stumble, but they know the way. The headstone is a little smudge of black, nowhere important. Huck rests an ungloved hand on it, strokes the down curve, over the stone's shoulders.

It is winter in Brooklyn and his hands are cold and his back is aching but he is drawn as if by a strong thread, pulling on his heart, running around his wrists in loops as red as blood.

"Hi, dad."


End file.
